


Blowing Bubbles

by amnesiophilia



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-30
Updated: 2013-01-30
Packaged: 2017-11-27 13:16:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/662417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amnesiophilia/pseuds/amnesiophilia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A few moments with the Witch of Life as she does something which is very good, and very important.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blowing Bubbles

She frowned. Her forehead had a narrow slope, and wriggling her brows shunted her goggles into a half-inch clearance with her skin. They were getting kind of loose, and kind of old; the strap was a black sort of biological materiel that was supposed to grow with you, but it had died when she’d been struck by lightning.

The rims were just plastic, pink, made in a factory on one of the colonies. Distant. She wasn’t allowed to make the Royal Tour until her age of majority, of course, but her antecedent was in the habit of sending the occasional sugar-sweet letter (which Feferi very much doubted was written in her hand) detailing the Empire’s most recent adventures, acquisitions, and predominances. They usually came with photos and a tacky little gift: black hair, grinning teeth, pink eyes. It was a sort of taunt or double-feint, a sop to the sympathies of a doubly-loyal populace who in their devotion to the Empire were troublingly keen on the young heiress not getting murdered by a shark before she could take the throne. The goggles had come from one of these, anyway. The worst part was that she really liked them.

“So what would happen otherwise?” she asked. She was wrapped in a plush purple bathrobe. Apocalypse was in the air - here, too. Feferi could touch life’s tendrils, wrap them around things, weave them into things. Here, on Derse, they were squirming away, less and less every hour, like rats diving from a sinking ship - to her eyes they were like undulating, bioluminescent flatworms, scoring through the air in a migration by ones and twos. Life wasn’t going to be here soon. The smooth black citizens didn’t know that, she thought, but here on the isolated peninsula of the Regent’s Moon it was a different story.

The goggles were very useful here. They protected her eyes from the void.

What came back in response to her question was a difficult thing to discuss. When talking about it with her friends, she would later say “they know” or “they told me”. In actuality this was a simplification: it was more like the information was instantiated into her brain through her retinas, and when it was it had the sense of a headache about it, like a cube of hard metal containing the thought had been lodged between her rumination lobes.

If you took the goggles off, things got a little…rawer. She would keep them on, for now. It might be the last time. She didn’t want things to go wrong on the last time.

This time, the thought was: nothingness. Oblivion. Erasure. An image of the flatworms, undulating; an image of their lights dwindling into abscess, their bodies expanding outwards into black. She put the faces of her friends on the bodies, herself, as her brain automatically painted up the thought to make it palatable to a troll consciousness. It struck her that they looked a little bit like grubs.

“Oh,” said Feferi, more sadly than weakly. As the Witch of Life this was a heavy blow.

And the thought was: yes.

There were five other little cells - in the monastic sense, this wasn’t prison, she hoped! - on the Regent’s Moon. One of them was empty because the boy who had lived here was awake right now, had flown away a long time ago

(only weeks)

and now was slouched in his computer chair with his arms folded and his glasses lilting as he stared dully at the screen. He’d escaped death once and as it turned out, as Feferi had very much always suspected, it had been worth it because death was nothing, death was horrible, and it was probably worse than torture, death.

“I could make a space for him,” she said quietly to the starless black gabardine above.

The idea was: a foot, one white shoe, crossing into a line of blackness and setting down so that it made a tenebrous ripple. Thin tendrils of white sprouting from the shoe, like a plant. Even though it hurt to think about it was beautiful. The tendrils latticed, curled up at the edges, created a space and she could see his laugh silhouetted against blackness.

Another thought struck her. It was a simple thought, but very sad, and it made her want to cry.

“What about…”

Another of the cells was empty because it had never been full. The girl who it had been meant for - and she had visited, Feferi, and it was heartbreaking because the place was decorated _like_ her, in between their stars and moons the sheets were printed with tiny reproductions of her lusus and on a peg by the door hung a snug brown horn-holed hat - the girl who it had been _meant_ for had never shown up.

“Shown up” was a euphemism. Oh, she was here, all right. Some part of her was here, for all it counted. But she’d never slept, and she’d never visited Derse, and if she had happened to see the hat now, she wouldn’t have cared for it.

The thought that reciprocated hers stang like venom. It was too big, too complex; if she hadn’t had the goggles she might have staggered back. She blinked. It was…something, something to do with…saliva with the taste of iron was welling in her mouth. It was something to do with shape, contradictions, and - the image of the metal teeth Equius had built for Aradia, the image of her rivet-plated face, bulging and bursting apart and inside only fire - her gorge rose. Whatever came next in this sequence, it was making her pulmonary canals throb aerobically along her temples, and she knew it was outside her grasp. She knew that suddenly and with a vital desperation, because if she hadn’t sealed up the path by looking quickly at the floor and squeezing her eyes shut so tight she saw stars, her head probably would have exploded. They were…lovely, in their way, the Outer Things, but they didn’t quite…understand…

They didn’t understand how small, how lithe, how lissome, a single thing could be, because they were creatures of the wholeness of things, and of things whose wholeness was without dimension.

“Forget I asked,” she whispered, which they wouldn’t. “But the others?” She didn’t like forgetting Aradia, but touching that spot was danger, it was a danger she couldn’t have imagined. Something terrible was going on and it was something she couldn’t finish absorbing the concept of, let alone prevent. Feferi’s mind was not a vast one: her power was a small thing, a touch, a kiss, a whisper. She was weak and limited - you never felt that stronger than when you were here, talking to the gods, even as at the same time you felt envelopingly cherished. So when she said “But the others?” it was with a resolution in it - she couldn’t do _that_ , but she could do _this_. Regrets were commonplace. Sitting still was a good way to drown.

They approved of that. Perhaps because there was something in their environment, the black all-space of the Furthest Ring, that was like the endless deepness of the ocean - perhaps because of this, this sense of approval came across more easily to Feferi than almost any other idea she received from them. The only one stronger was the all-encompassing sense of love, the kind that wanted a kindred mind to sit still and tune into it. Eridan was scared of them. When she’d first taken him up here to look into the void he’d panicked and tuned out, he’d felt them plying at his ears and peeling up the skins of his eye-balls and he’d almost fainted, in fact had emptied the contents of his stomach over the elegant night-purple balustrade. To Feferi it was obvious: it was like watching a small, household pet panic at being picked up and held in hand, interpreting the calm pressure of a stroking thumb as a weapon trying to press through its spine. To Eridan, she’d realised uncomfortably over the course of the time she’d known him, almost everything was really a weapon. He thought you could peel back the skin of the world and find a gun. Something that powerful must have really scared him: there was no way for him to use it.

To “But the others?”, after a slow inveigling of ticklish thoughts, she felt something smooth stretching out in a way that bulged her cranium. The web of white lines she’d seen building a home for Sollux expanded: they rooted out in a dozen different ways, linking, connecting, making petty kingdoms which changed shape and grew and sprouted roots of their own. Slowly she slid off her goggles, noting the slight ache of the skin under her eyes where they’d been hugging too tight (and she hadn’t been sleeping enough, of course). Lines of iridescent colour, like electricity, began to run along the fruit-fleshy white cables; images of eyes and mouths in different shades of blood, some olive, some purple, a surprising amount red, began to flash warmly like afterimages in the lattices’ inner spheres. She saw laughing fangs and teeth - like the humans had, a shock of surprise, those flat herbivorous things - aimed at each other, papering the void. The feeling in her head had an anaesthetic numbness, like a swelling balloon, and when she shut it off it was out of responsibility, not pain. This had been too lovely to hurt much.

Back in the austere reality of the violet moon, which ebbed now - the phosphorescent flatworms replacements for the absent stars in that many of them were, by now, just specks dotting space - back in this two-tone fiefdom of black and calming purple, Feferi took a breath.

“I’ll do it,” she said, and her own sharp teeth made the whitest grin they could, a tone of princess, last blood, life, against the increasingly empty black and purple city. Her goggles dangled by the lifeless strap clasped rubbery in her hand, and she looked up straight, knowing this _would_ be the last time, that she wouldn’t stand here and seek counsel - not like this - not ever again.

The life was going out of everything, but there was something else without - now. Out there in what might have been nothingness, there was a hand, a warm place, a little bit of happy snugness. The kind you got from a warm hat - the kind you got from a kiss. And that was all, and there wasn’t death as it might have been, because the Witch of Life had tried to make it so.

“That’s not bad,” she said quietly to herself, smiling.

The thought was: no.

And she smiled even deeper still, and said she would fly up to see them, to be near them, before she should wake up - you know, she added - just as the bubbles are blown.


End file.
